Plans for the Week of September 5th

​Hello Families,
It was wonderful to welcome your students to 2nd grade last week. I hope they enjoyed their 4 day weekend. My family and I had fun on a little beach outing in Beverly. My little monkeys --I mean, boys-- had fun climbing around the playground, collecting shells in their buckets, and watching the boats zip around the harbor. It was a nice "farewell" to summer.

Important Dates This Week

• Monday, September 5th Labor Day, no school.
• Tuesday September 6th: Likely our first indoor recess. Full day of school.
• Friday, September 9th- O'Connor studio school picture order forms will be sent home.

Please see The Starburst (the Barrows weekly newsletter) for more details on school-wide happenings.

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Last Week
We played some getting-to-know-you activities and learned how to coexist in the classroom safely and respectfully. Above, you can see students playing the Colored Dot Game in which they had to find all of the other students in the class who had the same colored dot on their foreheads --without speaking. It was very fun and showed students how to use non-verbal communication.

Here is an outline of my general plan for the week.  Please reach out with any questions or messages!

Community Building

• Establish our Morning Meeting routine with some fun greetings (like What's the Word), activities (like Grandma's Trunk), and sharing about ourselves.
• How to participate in partner and group discussion
• Projects to complete:  designing name tags to display in the room, writing about our hopes and goals for the year, and generating and voting on classroom rules.

Classroom Logistics

• How to use materials respectfully.
• Practice transitioning from the rug to desks to lining up.
• How to clean up and help each other.

Literacy

• Create expectations for literary discussion.
• Introduce reading response journals.
• Read some community-building books, discuss, and write about.
• Launch Fluency weekly reading practice with "Songs in Writing": Baa Baa Black Sheep, I’ve Been Working on the Railroad, and My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.
• I will begin administering a quick oral reading fluency assessment to get an idea of students' reading abilities. 

Writing

• Squiggle Story
• Introduce “because, but, so” writing elaboration technique.

Phonics

• Name Play: sounds, spelling, rhyming with our names.
• Launch Unit 1 in Fundations (phonics curriculum). 

Math

• Guided Discovery of math manipulatives
• Addition and subtraction bingo
• Launch Unit 1 of Illustrative Math (new math curriculum).

Content Areas
Science/Social Studies will launch next week.

Thank you for reading! Feel free to ask me more about any of my plans.